One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

MyAmericanFuture

MyAmericanFuture

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

December 10, 2014: Cold Culture: The Iceman Cometh

[To complement
last week’s series on winter histories, I wanted to focus this week on cultural
representations of the cold, wintry and otherwise. Add your cultural connections
for the cold, in all media and genres and with all meanings, for a frrrrrrrigid
weekend post, please!]

On a dark and
compelling portrait of hollow dreams, and where it comes up short.

The late 1940s
saw the first productions of an incredible trio of American dramatic works,
each among its talented author’s, as well as the century’s and the nation’s,
finest: Eugene O’Neill’s The
Iceman Cometh (written in 1939 but first performed
in 1946); Tennessee Williams’ A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947); and Arthur Miller’s Death
of a Salesman (1949). I wrote a bit about Miller’s portrayal of
identity, family, and the American Dream in
this post; I hope to do the same for Williams’ play, and the equally compelling and
groundbreaking 1951 film version, at some point down the road. But today I
wanted to focus specifically on the coldest of the trio, in every sense: O’Neill’s
funny and dynamic but ultimately bleak and cynical Iceman.

Examined in
relationship to O’Neill’s general métier, the kinds of extreme, psychological
family melodramas exemplified by Long Day’s Journey into Night
(1956) and Desire Under the Elms
(1924), Iceman is positively comic by
comparison. The dreamers and schemers who populate the play’s barroom setting are
as drunken and deluded as O’Neill’s characters tend to be, but they’re also a
lively and witty bunch, one-upping each other’s stories and attempted cons as
they await the titular character and their collective icon, legendary salesman Theodore “Hickey”
Hickman. To my mind, those diverse tones make IcemanO’Neill’s
most successful work, not only at keeping an audience engaged throughout
but also at capturing both the dreams and the nightmares, the myths and the
realities, that so often comprise American identities, individual and communal.
When Hickey’s story and identity collapse in the play’s final act, that is, the
contrast between the ideal and the real is emphasized—for the other characters
and for us—far more potently and effectively than would otherwise be the case.

Yet Iceman is not without its shortcomings,
and in many ways they’re as telling as its strengths. For one thing, the play’s
depiction of women is even more limited than Death of a Salesman’s (as I discussed in that aforementioned post);
Iceman’s prostitutes are quite literally
cyphers on whom the much more complex male characters simply project their
needs and myths, and that’s even more true of the absent female character (Hickey’s murdered wife)
on whom much of the play’s climax hinges. But even if we take the play on its
own terms, focus on those complex characters at its heart, I would argue that
in their distinct but ultimately parallel stories O’Neill’s cynical coldness
becomes self-fulfilling and thus self-defeating. That is, if every image is
false, every story a myth, every dream a delusion, it becomes far less possible
to invest in the significance of any one such story and hope—if they’re all “pipe
dreams,” to use the
play’s constant refrain, then no particular one of them, nor by extension
any of ours, matters at all. That level of consistent cynicism is more than
just unappealing to
a critical optimist such as this AmericanStudier—it becomes more of a
reflex than an analytical or thoughtful take on identity or America.

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#NoConfederateSyllabus

In response to the controversy over HBO's proposed show Confederate, Matthew Teutsch and I have collaborated on #NoConfederateSyllabus, a Google Doc that you all can contribute to as well. Check out an intro here: